Levels of child poverty hold steady in state, report says

Families hit by high housing and child-care costs; but more kids get health care

6:00 AM,
Apr. 24, 2014

A Holmdel Township class' students wrote what poverty means to them in this 2008 file photo. While families' median incomes rose in 2012 after three years in decline, an annual report about children in New Jersey says levels of child poverty still aren't dropping in most places and child-care options have been shrinking in all but a handful of counties. .

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While families' median incomes rose in 2012 after three years in decline, an annual report about children in New Jersey says levels of child poverty still aren't dropping in most places and child-care options have been shrinking in all but a handful of counties.

The annual New Jersey Kids Count report, released today, finds a familiar pattern in rankings of counties that rely on 13 measures of overall well-being of children: wealthy counties such as Hunterdon, Morris and Somerset atop the charts and poorer counties in South Jersey, Cumberland, Atlantic, Salem and Camden, at the bottom.